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Jesus Coyote

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Harold Jaffe has emerged as the most critically important writer of our time. In the midst of a publishing world full of commercial texts littered with clichéd romance and crime drama; a literary world infected with mass-produced, politically correct "workshop" fiction; and a journalistic world plagued by false "non-fiction" accounts sold by charlatans and purchased by acquiescent conglomerates, Harold Jaffe' work--fiction and "docu-fiction"--offers acute societal insights in the context of innovative, highly energized fictive and literary structures, epistemological investigations, and compelling character portraits.

These are the characteristics which define Jaffe's latest work, JESUS COYOTE, an incisive investigation and portrait of events, characters, social dynamics, and motivations surrounding Charles Manson and his followers. Notably, JESUS COYOTE, refers to actual individuals only obliquely, by action and tangential reference, renaming those individuals involved. Additionally, in the text timelines are inverted and/or conflated to emphasize societal connections. However, it is clear that the motivations for these literary choices have nothing to do with concerns of legalistic accuracy or limitations of artistic license regarding public figures, but rather these literary choices function tropologically to expand the presentation of characters and events such that they can be examined within their larger social contexts, in addition to being viewed individually. This scrupulous literary process enables a macroscopic overview and provides an organic unity to the ostensibly nonsensical acts of Manson and his followers, and presents their subculture as an outgrowth of the facades and failures of dominant society, as opposed to an individualized societal or psychological aberration.

JESUS COYOTE has a bifurcated form. The initial sections of the text provide a series of communications, via telephone, media, office memoranda, and personal conversations, among various characters which, taken together, comprise an outline of a myriad of social forces. The next sections of the text provide personal statements of various characters, forming intimate psychoanalytical portraits which exist both autonomously and in relation to the social dynamics set forth in the first sections of the text. This combination offers an examination of "reality" in its completed form: an ever-fluctuating relationship between reality proffered by social, institutional, and political forces as a societal exoskeleton-- juxtaposed and conjoined with individuated perceptions. In a larger sense, this combination is in fact a representation of the tension between collective consciousness and self-perception.

The result of this polarized representation is to generate systematic social investigations, particularly as they concern institutional and commercial dysfunctions. The prison system, both juvenile and adult, is delineated as the primary producer of Jesus Coyote, and the de-facto creator of his power as both a misfit and master of society at large. Throughout this society at large, potent capitalist strains lead to the commodification of all aspects of human behavior: police "operatives" sell their information, psychics provide no guidance and betray their patrons for material gain, media sources forsake the Jeffersonian "need to know" for titillating headlines at the expense of accuracy--fully aware that in a repressed and commodified society, consumers are hungry for grisly and lusty details to enable vicarious experiences.

Such media sales dynamics are inexorably linked with the ever-present, quasi-Puritanical desire of institutions and government to control sexuality and utilize the inherent repression of that control to fuel consumerism and materialism. As Coyote acolyte "Hedda" explains from prison, merging broad socialist orientations with a 60's free-love agenda: "In America..., the body is seen as private property, another kind of capital. With us, the body was communal property..." As if to provide an excuse for readers' lurid fascination with sex and violence, the dominant society depicted in JESUS COYOTE engages in a never-ending attempt to blame all aspects of counter-culture behavior on drugs as a shield to cover any inherent dissatisfaction with that dominant culture itself.

Jaffe's literary form in JESUS COYOTE allows the expansion of subject matter beyond the original Manson-related events and personalities, without minimizing the importance and intrigue of individual personalities. Broad concepts such as ecology and free will are explored in statements by Coyote-followers Hedda and LuAnn during an illegal interrogation:

Hedda: How much will does a leopard in a cage have?
LuAnn: How much will does a homeless person have? ...
Hedda: How much will does a polluted birch tree have? More than you can imagine.

And as America-centered as JESUS COYOTE is, transcontinental social commentary is evident nonetheless, as in veiled criticism of a European filmmaker's careerism and egocentricity, even in the face of his young wife and child's brutal murders. Yet French and American preferences in media stimuli are differentiated, as are artistic and bourgeois perceptions of events. Reporting the murders, American headlines immediately highlight drug-use as the cause of events, while French media emphasize orgying and sexual mutilation. And while bourgeois American readers avidly consume specific details of the crimes, self-proclaimed European artistic-geniuses and cognoscenti eschew the banality of those same details. Upon close inspection, it is clear that these very assertions of banality are in fact attempts at self-inflation and self-congratulation.

The character investigations in JESUS COYOTE are both generalized and specific. The precise nature of Coyote's manipulative power and imagination is exposed, including the content of his linguistic guises, which simultaneously invert stereotypes and merge polarities--Jesus as Satan, Beauty in Death, etc. And always, death itself exists simultaneously as threat and premonition. Coyote harnesses the power of sexuality by preaching a "free love" which is by no means free, but has its own tithes, purveyances, and instantiated rituals. Yet Coyote's power is seen to be more than merely psychological and manipulative. He embodies a certain spiritual connection and enables a form of peace and belonging which his young followers find irresistible, and irresistibly satisfying. Moreover, the connection with the natural world that Coyote professes seems, in part, to be actual and documented. At the point in the text when Coyote, sleeping outside with his young lover, is apprehended, the police report: "The peculiar thing is that [their] sleeping bag was surrounded by a pack of coyotes that growled at us but then fled." The implcation is that Coyote had in fact summoned his animal brethren for protection.

In JESUS COYOTE, Harold Jaffe has once again created a text which is both extremely significant from a literary point of view, and intensely incisive from a sociological standpoint. The text is simultaneously informative and provocative, entertaining and cautionary. It is this multi-leveled nexus of forces, conscious and unconscious, which the genius of JESUS COYOTE conveys.

The multiple voicings, the clean prose, the ongoing play of ambiguities and transparencies all add up to make Harold Jaffe's Jesus Coyote a very smooth book. We expect it to be disturbing of course. No surprise there. What catches us off-guard is how engaging it all is, how easily it goes down. I recently watched a Manson documentary, and was surprised at how trite and dull the behavior of Mansion and his women seems now, almost 40 years later. Jaffe has taken what at this point looks like played out subject matter and made it work as literature. No mean feat.

Jaffe continues and extends his 'docufictional' exploration of
'deviance' in his latest novel, "Jesus Coyote," based on the Manson Family murders. With elegant style, Jaffe illuminates that strange moment in history where media coverage of Charles Manson and his counter-culture band of "Family" members held America hostage with the notorious Tate/LaBianca murders. Philosophically revolutionary, Jaffe analyzes the subject matter in a Rashoman like format featuring the viewpoint of participants and victims alike.
As the author so deftly reveals, Revolution is the intent; a revolution of consciousness where Manson is societies' scapegoat and the media driven capitalists the antagonists. Intelligent readers will see the subtle point of how the media circus uses the murders as a means to deflect public attention as far away as possible from the US government approved mass murders in Viet Nam.
These string of "docufictions" continue where "15 Serial Killers" leaves off. Much like "Kissinger," which points out that killing, if it is carried out by Navy Seals or Blackwater mercenaries is "necessary" and "heroic." Here, Jaffe exposes the embedded hypocrisy in each of these strategically architected stories. The result is a carefully crafted tapestry of graphic elegance that is complexly combined with a new revolutionary consciousness. The skill with which the author handles such serious subject matter resonates with his razor-sharp wit and high-beamed laser critique aimed directly at the target.

Harold Jaffe's blistering new novel, JESUS COYOTE (Raw Dog Screaming Press), re-imagines the Manson murders and the myths surrounding the guru at their core. This "docufiction" is Surreality TV--experimental, satirical, poetic, shocking, and on the mark.

Jaffe's vision is like a transcript discovered at a crime scene.

Harold Jaffe's novel "Jesus Coyote" re-appropriates the Manson Family myth as proscribed by the official culture, and brings us closer to a kind of truth via his narrative innovation, the docufiction. Ambitious in both narrative form and imaginative range, "Jesus Coyote" examines the characters and events surrounding the Manson Family (culminating in the Tate-LaBianca murders) from a variety of perspectives, including the victims (envisioned by Jaffe with great clarity and compassion), the women members of the Family, and finally Manson himself. Cagey, defiant and manipulative to the end, Manson has the last word in the mock interview that concludes this morally courageous, intellectually daring and unflinchingly honest look into this revealing and recent chapter of American cultural/criminal history.

A haunting and unforgettable collage of voices, Harold Jaffe's Jesus Coyote combines fiction and documentary in order to examine the complexities and continued relevance of the Manson "family" murders.

Jaffe's provocative tour de force pastiche of one of the best-known episodes in popular culture history analyzes and undermines the Manson myth.

As with 15 Serial Killers and other texts in his ouvre, Jaffe neither celebrates nor turns away from the violence or the perpetrators of it but looks beyond the easy responses, the media knee-jerk sanctimony, and cable network fetishization of Manson, intimately re-imagining and making new what miles of newsprint and videotape and collective historical amnesia have turned stale.

And beyond all that, it's an enjoyable read.

The era referred to as the Sixties began in 1958 with the Vietnam War. Also in 1958: Charles Manson finished his first official prison term for a series of crimes and probation violations. In 1971, he was sentenced to death for the Tate-LaBianca murders, though he later received a stay of execution. In 1975, the Vietnam War ended. The relationship between the War and Manson is not causal, though one could argue that if the War created the counterculture movement, then Mason destroyed it. The one to argue this is Harold Jaffe in his new novel, Jesus Coyote. The War itself is not prominent in Jesus Coyote, but its presence is inherent in the subtext (when asked to name his favorite serial killer, "excluding yourself," Jesus Coyote says, "Henry Kissinger. Madonna called him Caca.") Read straight as a docufiction -- Jaffe's signature form -- the novel is a shocking and sensitive second-look at Manson-the-myth, told through conflicting points-of-view, at once positioning him as mystic-savior, molestation-victim and psychopath. Shocking, because the facts of the events are horrific, the blind faith of the Manson "family" is too real to believe. Sensitive, because Jaffe does not withhold, does not judge, and allows points-of-view to flesh themselves out. If read as an allegory, however, Jesus Coyote is a story about the failure of the Sixties counterculture to impact official culture in a lasting way ( Jesus Coyote - the figure of permanent resistance - is in jail for life). The key to this reading is Jaffe's fictional name for Sharon Tate: Naomi Self. Jaffe refers to the killings as "the Self murders" or "the Self killings." The decadence of Hollywood (Tate's famous husband Roman Polanski said that he always identified with counterculture) and the violence of the Manson family (simultaneous with the increasing militancy of some New Left organizations) led to a mainstream distrust of counterculture. In other words, the Sixties killed itself -- self-murder. "They had good reason to clamp down on the counter-culture," Jaffe wrote. "Because we were a big threat to so-called normal society."

Jesus Coyote by Harold Jaffe is a dark and gruesome interpretation of the actions of Charles Manson and his loyal family. I read this book before I read anything or researched what actually happened in Los Angeles in 1969. Having read the book and now read up on what happened in the Manson slaughter one must appreciate how Harold Jaffe was able to masterfully craft Jesus Coyote. It is a realistic interpretation that drew me in with its creativity and hooked me with its realistic elements.
Jaffe's docudrama of the Manson Family is chaotic, dark, exciting and raunchy. The novel utilizes fictionalized testimony, phone calls, press conferences and interviews from tribe members, the DA, and even the Jesus Coyote himself to retell the story of Charles Manson and his loyal band of followers.

Jesus Coyote is at once disturbing and compelling, shocking and alluring, repulsive and sympathetic, much like the Charles Manson/Coyote figure, himself. In this work of `docu-fiction' Harold Jaffe crafts his novel perhaps as his protagonist/antagonist would when subjected to an interview from his prison cell: by using a variety of perspectives to tell his story, he leaves his audience perplexed and not entirely sure of what is fact and what is fiction regarding the events surrounding the Manson murders of August, 1969.
The narrative, crafted from several viewpoints including those of the Police, the murder suspects, and the victims, neither condemns nor supports any one side involved, rather Jaffe questions in a subtle way our inclination to believe what we are told, as we `hear' the stories told by of each of the characters. Our notions of morality are challenged, specifically as he presents us with questionable scenarios concerning media sensationalism of celebrity and government.
By using extreme and graphic descriptions of sex and violence, western society's favorite taboos, along with allusions to such atrocities such as prison rape, child abuse, prostitution, and pornography to expose the civilian apathy and blatant hypocrisy of accepted societal norms, Jaffe looks at traditional notions of good and evil, black and white, Jesus and the Devil and offers no simple answers. He uses newspaper headlines, police transcripts, and one-sided interviews to illustrate the potential power of the media and its inclination for propaganda and spin.
Jesus Coyote even manages to incorporate a message about environmentalism in its critique of western society using one of the Manson family females passionate about "Air, Trees, Water, and Animals" as the vehicle. Coyote himself during one interview said he wanted to `get back to the desert with the coyotes and the scorpions - away from people'; he, too can be said to be a strong advocate for environmentalism. Jaffe's novel, although relatively short in length, took a while to read, as it, for me, was very dense and disturbing. Using Charles Manson and his followers as not only icons of evil in an apathetic society, but also as victims of media sensationalism itself, the novel successfully shocks and disturbs, perplexes and allures, as it brings together so many issues that are very relevant to our lives today.